Pro Commerce

Hippies became Lefties

I have noticed that most hippies are Lefties these days.  Hippies, as demonstrated in my earlier blog on this subject, were not Lefty politicos; they were non-political.

The hippies and the Left have converged in the past decade.  What the hippies did believe in was immanent Armageddon due to human moral failings.  In the 1970 hippie era the expected Armageddon was based on over population, mass starvation, resource scarcity and nuclear winter.

Now the aging hippies are comfortable to join with the Left and the Left to join with the hippies in the CO2 Armageddon hysteria (human induced global warming).

Surprised?

Yesterday morning the SF Examiner published the biannual homeless data.  Put in rounded numbers (which reflects the correct level of accuracy) San Francisco had 6,000 homeless at the beginning of 2005.

Now subtract the 3,000 homeless who got housing in the two intervening years for a cost of roughly $15 million and subtract the 2,000 homeless who were given free bus tickets to go to their original homes.  If you subtract 3,000 and 2,000 from 6,000 we should have 1,000 homeless still left in San Francisco.

Fortunately, the SF Examiner is owned by Philip Anschutz a brilliant businessman who can read numbers and hires reporters who can read numbers and who are allowed to publish numbers in the Examiner, unlike every other newspaper in the U.S. (except for the Wall Street Journal which also allows reporters to use numbers in their reporting).

Surprise... now, instead of 1,000 homeless left in the City, the census shows we still have over 6,000.  The most likely reason is that providing housing and bus tickets attracts homeless to San Francisco.  This is what Trent Rhorer, head of the homeless program, has to say: "The City is proud of the work that’s been done so far and will continue to ... work on extending services and housing to homeless people..."

Thanks Phil Anschutz, your newspaper has not only shown the failure of this 85% Lefty City to understand rudimentary economics but the City's failure to understand 2nd grade arithmetic.

Physics quiz

I have a favorite glass that I take to Peets for my morning coffee.  I prefer the taste and feel of glass for a fine cappuccino (no whipped cream) to the standard plastic lined paper cup. It is also beautiful and, in environmentally loony San Francisco, it is a sign of an environmentalist to bring one's own coffee cup to a coffee shop.

The glass is insulated with a hollow area between the inner cup and the outer cup. In geometric terms, it is a hollow sphere pressed into the shape of a cup without the inside touching the outside.  I assume the space inside is filled with air, but it might be of a lower pressure than the outside atmosphere since it was hot when it was sealed.

Quiz: When I wash the cup in a dish pan and fill it with water, will the cup float? 

Answer: Archimedes. Mass not weight is the issue.  Just the glass as a lump would sink in water.  This glass has been stretched into a hollow sphere and would unquestionably float.  The glass, filled with water, merely turns itself over and floats pretty much like a sphere.

Sold it all

When the market opened this morning I sold all my stock.  All. Domestic and foreign.

The market will have a significant drop, 10-20% when we go to war with Iran because oil is important and the Straits of Hormuz can not be fully protected. My signal is the price of oil, which went from $55 earlier this year to $65 this morning.

This attack on Iran has been a year in the planning. There are three carrier groups in the Straits.  Two of ours and one French.  At the moment they are conducting joint exercises with the British.

Debka reports that the Russians have leaked that this attack will take 12 hours, beginning Friday April 6th and is called 'Bite'.  (When you have the French with you in any military operation, as we did in the Belgrade bombing, the Russians will know everything.)

To me the more important clues are the hostage taking of 15 Brits, and the renewed public cowardice of the American Democratic Party of the past week.

Every foreign service officer in the world knows that the failure of Jimmy Carter to act in 1978 led to WW4 (as labeled by Eliot Cohen and Norman Podhoretz) just as Neville Chamberlain's failure led to WW2. The cowardice of the Democratic Congress of 1972 led to the American failure in Vietnam and the death of more than a million Cambodians in 1976. 

The cowardice of the Democratic Congress of 2006 will not be allowed to send a message to the world.

Great hero of our time

Lee Kuan Yew is still alive and should be considered one of the greatest people of the 20th Century.  Lee Kuan Yew created an island nation on a tiny spit of land with no resources other than a good harbor and enough space for an airport, with a majority Chinese population that grew to be 3/4th Chinese.  Yew's nation, Singapore, is one of the cleanest, most prosperous and successful nations on the planet.

Lew Kuan Yew stands in stark contrast to the other prominent leaders of small nations from the same era. The others seized control of a small population by force, killed thousands after gaining power and led their people to destitution:  Fidel Castro, Adolph Arafat, Kim Il-sung, Nuon Chea (Cambodia), Daniel Ortega and a dozen African leaders.

Lee Kuan Yew's brilliant invention of a free market society with a limited democracy has become the example that has saved the lives of tens of millions of other Chinese in China and citizens all over the world from Russia to Vietnam.

Good week

Last week was a good week.

Rush Limbaugh reported the story that the new NASA-Japanese satellite sent back solar images from the X-ray spectrum showing enormous subsurface forces that had never been seen before.

Rush properly interpreted this as further evidence that Global Warming is a religious position since the relevant science is constantly changing.  The sun is always being underrated in the Global Warming hysteria.

I've been aware of the scientific community's failure to appreciate the power of solar changes since the Intriligator solar waves brought down the shuttle Columbia in 2003. I wrote about it in an earlier blog.

The story about the BBC Global Warming -scam program was published last week, nationally, in the Examiner by one of the highest ranking NASA climatologists who is quoted in the BBC documentary.

Lastly , BusinessWeek, the most Left leaning business magazine, looked at the leading businesses that offer carbon offsets.  Carbon Offsets are what Al Gore and the entire big-spending luxury-loving Lefties prize as their way of being hypocrites.  They claim to buy carbon offsets to mitigate their putrid environmental footprint.

BusinessWeek checked on the three leading sellers of carbon offsets. Two are so secretive that there is no way to know what they do.  As an "open books" businessperson this tells me that they are lying, scamming, phonies. The third carbon offset seller, a San Francisco company, gave BusinessWeek the necessary data and when BusinessWeek checked, all the references were scams. The methane sequestering was being done before the offset money was sent to the companies involved; the companies were "just grateful for the added income."

Global Warming seems to be a great religion for hypocrites.

Stop the presses

There is a must read article by William Langewiesche in the April Vanity Fair. The magazine does not have the article online.

Here is the summary online:

158 CITY OF FEAR

In May 2006, São Paulo was brought to its knees by a prison gang, whose cell-phone-coordinated attack shut down Brazil's largest metropolis, and whose word is still law in the city's vast slums. William Langewiesche delves into the dark side of globalization.

I've read two of Langewiesche's books (Meditation on Flight/WTC) and he rates as one of the most honest accurate writers I know of.

I have written to the one person who knows the inside of California prisons to see how much of Sao Paulo conditions are already here in California. 

My particular concern is San Francisco, which completely lacks a police force.  Our police officers will not leave their stations, even now, in daylight. One event like the Sao Paulo shutdown could permanently cripple San Francisco.

BBC to the rescue

I hope by now you know that the BBC Channel 4 did a wonderful program debunking Global Warming.  This is a wonderful kick in the ass for the Lefty Fundamentalists who worship at the alter when the BBC spews its venom on Israel. The sacred BBC is saying, in great depth, that Global Warming is a scam...an expensive scam. The program is available at Google Video.

This brings up two points for me.  First, I realized that the Al Gore film got an Oscar because two groups who vote on Oscars converged.  Lefties, who are always paranoid and believe that humans should be fixed by government, voted for the Gore film in spite of its zero theatrical quality, and so did the business people in Hollywood who usually sit through boring Power Point presentations.  Al Gore was the first interesting Power Point presentation the business folk had ever seen.

The second point for me was a recent airplane seatmate conversation.  My seat mate, a leading expert in the field of cell phone towers, told me about cell phone tower base station technology.  There are six reception and transmission channels that can handle a total of 150 simultaneous conversation; along a freeway this can reach for five miles. The average call is 90 seconds and the industry standard is that the equipment can't drop more than 5 calls per 1,000. A single antenna can service about 3,600 phones; most are not in use at any one time. 

The surprise was that my seatmate, knowing I was a business person and a statistician brought up global warming.  Turns out that much of his antenna reception work is effected by weather which has an 11 day cycle induced by the sun's rotation.  He just can't believe that global warming isn't entirely caused by other unknown solar cycles since the sun can effect his equipment so easily.

Serious modern dating

What does a young person do these days if they are in their 20s or 30s, want a family and a home? 

When they date someone of interest, (in many, if not most cases) they will learn from the object of their new found love, that the other person has tens of thousands of dollars of college debt, and often thousands more of credit card debt post college? 

What do you do?  If one person has little or no debt and the other is overwhelmed, how does family formation proceed?

There is no way out of college or credit card debt these days.  The college debt was created by our government and can't be eliminated (except for volunteering years in a third world country).  The U.S. government created 100% insured college loans which means that lenders exercise no judgement in restraining debt limits.  Bank loans might as well be approved by an ATM machine.

The U.S. government recently did the same with bankruptcy laws that effect credit card debt. Thanks to Congress, credit card issuers exercise little or no restraint.

So what do people do?  Look for others without debt if they have none themselves?  Look for others with debt, if they are swamped themselves?

My young friends tell me that this subject usually awaits the forth date before it comes up.

Programmers in Israel

If you are in the programming and computer world you may want to look at a unique site that not only provides a salary survey of jobs in Israel and the working conditions but also has a listing of relevant jobs.

A real-time programmer or a manager of programmers gets $5,000 a month; 92% of the workers surveyed like their job, half work 45 hours a week or less, nearly everyone gets transportation provided, one third get stock options and one third get an annual bonus.

Check it out. Translate the shekels to dollars at roughly 4 to 1 and consider that living costs in Israel are lower than in most of the U.S. especially knowing the excellent health care and exciting technical environment.

International accounting

I did and still do consulting outside the United States.  I never have a problem reading financial statements overseas, though I work in a dozen countries with five different languages, because the non-American companies all use the same International Accounting system.  They all have the same chart of accounts.  I can read financial statements without knowing the language they are written in.

The SEC is considering a proposal to allow foreign companies to use the International Accounting standards for their SEC reporting and annual report filings.

International Accounting standards are different and the inherent logic is different but it is just as accurate and just as reliable as the American Accounting system.

I support his move 100%.  It will probably lead to some American companies feeling free to do the same thing.  Another good thing in a global, English speaking, American dominated, commercial world.

Write your letters of support for permission to use International Accounting standards to:  Christopher Cox, Chair SEC  [email protected]

Test: knowing the outcome

I can't find where I read it, but a research group found a totally reliable test that predicts hard working dependable workers.  They wouldn't describe the test for fear of making it useless.  They said that it included a small paragraph of instructions that required the test taker to stop and read the instructions before answering the simple multiple choice question. Test takers who read the instructions carefully knew exactly which response to choose (D), everyone else picked an obvious one of the other multiple choice answers (A).  The ones who read the instructions carefully (D) were 100% predictably the "hard working dependable workers."

I came across just such good predictors in my first year of doing marketing research.  I was at the Bank of America working with an economist.  We were using an IBM card sorting machine (called a computer in those days).  We were comparing personal loan and credit applications of a pile of people who turned out to be good credit versus a pile of people who turned out to be bad.  We developed an equation with about four variables that was a near perfect predictor of credit outcomes.

This was the first use of a credit scoring system that I know of and Bank of America sold our work widely in the industry. What I can tell you now is that there were two elements, in 1964, that combined to give a 100% certainty in predicting credit outcomes.  One was whether the applicant put a telephone number in the space provided for a telephone number on the application and the other was whether the applicant filled in all the blank spaces on the application.  Failure to do either was a sign of a future bad loan.  Of course failure to put in a phone number automatically put the applicant in the category of not filling in every space.

The equation was used widely and I doubt most credit scoring companies ever knew the underlying elements of the equations we used.  Had people known the underlying elements of credit scoring they would have known how to get a perfect score.

Peter Schwartz...wrong

Peter Schwartz of the Global Business Network has made one of the most preposterous public statements I can imagine about the issue of Global Warming.  Apparently, in their press release reported here, GBN was paid to come up with a worst case scenario on the future prospects of sea water rising and other climate changes. Peter, in the press release, is predicting societal breakdown on a large scale and he chooses three ridiculous examples: Haiti, Bangladesh and New Orleans. (Most of the actual report deals with other issues.)

Let me begin with a statement of historic fact: wherever commerce is thriving, environmental changes will be turned into positive outcomes.  With commerce, all the bags of lemons becomes lemonade.  The kid with a lemonade stand in from of his/her house is my metaphor for the way commerce turns problems into prosperity.

Historic fact: we wouldn't even know about the last global warming period, 900-1100 CE, if it weren't for the Viking sagas telling about their settlement of Greenland and their discovery of America during a warming period.  The Vikings were one of several great expansionary commercial societies, taking advantage of environmental changes in their era.

Back to the Schwartz nonsense.....

History

I recommend this article by Victor Davis Hanson. The following is a summary of what he discusses in detail: "Given all of this country's past wars involving intelligence failures, tactical and strategic blunders, congressional fights and popular anger at the president, Iraq and the rising furor over it are hardly unusual."

Read our history.You will enjoy this article.

Jonathan Club

My partner just gave me a wooden coat hanger with the Jonathan Club inscribed on it.  It has an interesting historic meaning to me.

The story starts in 1957 when I was a radical, blue jeaned, bearded student at the University of Chicago. The only one on the campus at the time.

I spent time with several mature black students (called "Negroes" at the time) who were loosely associated with Roosevelt University in downtown Chicago. I helped out by going along to white barbershops on 63rd Street.  One of my friends and I would go into a barbershop, sit down to wait our turn and the barbers would call the cops.  White barbershops did not serve blacks, so the cops would take my friend down for booking at the police station and I would be there to bail him out.  I could also be called to testify later, but that never happened.

Jump forward more than a decade to 1970.  I am a ....

The Left is not Liberal

I'm waiting for a campaign that says "The Left is not Liberal."  In fact, the Left is anti-Liberal.

Liberalism has obviously, for a century and a half, been associated with the free market, free expression of ideas, diversity of opportunity in the society and support for democratic discourse.

I guess I will have to start pointing out the ways the Left is anti-Liberal and start the campaign myself.

First up.  A primary source of women in leadership positions is the officer corp in the military.  So where are women being excluded?  On all the elite campuses that ban the ROTC.  The non-liberal idea of "hate the military" so fervently held by the Left, especially the academic Left, is keeping women from getting exposure to real leadership training that the truly 'open to women and minorities' American Military offers.

Second up.  The Left just adores the Palestinians.  A society that punishes gays, teaches school children to become suicidal murderers and thrives on never ending inter-tribal vengence, especially concerning women and virginity.  Not a single Liberal idea is left to be squashed in the West Bank or Gaza.

General Social Survey Part 2

The NYTimes published a few charts from the 2006 General Social Survey.  I want to comment on a several more.

Four first charts show the influence of the hippies.  The first: hippy pot smokers have replaced the earlier generation but they are still only one third of the adult population and are not gaining in influence.

Many drugs became illegal nationally in the early 1980s.  From that point the legality of pot took on a new meaning.  Support for pot smoking rose from 15% to 30% over twenty years and seems to have reached its peak. Pot will be legal in some parts of the country and illegal in the rest....something we already know.

Pre-marital sex is more accepted.  Thanks to hippies. Strong anti-pre marital sex attitudes have steadily dropped from 35% to 25%.

Porn is more common. Hippy "free love" attitudes have had a small effect raising the proportion of people who see porn from 15% to 25%.  Hippies only created the millieu, video tapes and the Internet provided the technology.

Hippies also softened attitudes toward spanking children, which is only measured from the early 1980s. Oppostion to spanking rose from 15% to 25%.

The two most interesting charts of this entire study, for me, are about newspapers and Congress.

Newspaper daily readership has dropped steadily from 1972 at 70% to 35% in 2006. "Steadily" is the key word.  The Internet did not destroy newspapers, they were already in decline twenty years earlier.  TV and radio were replacing newspapers before the Internet came along.  The leveling off in the 1980s and the continued decline after that also suggests the Limbaugh hypothesis.  When right wing radio emerged on the scene, the Leftism of the newspapers became more obvious and less acceptable. That was particularly true in the late 1990s with the explosion of popularity of Fox News.

This point is confirmed in the "Confidence" chart that shows a steadily decline in confidence in journalists from a high of 35% to the current 10%.  Are we supprised? Most recently The Weekly Standard published an expose' of George Polk in whos' name the highest journalism award is given.  Polk turns out to have been a total liar.  None of the Lefty media would publish the expose'.  We are right to distrust journalists.

Lastly, in the confidence chart, Congress has always been at the bottom of Americans' confidence charts.  What this chart shows is that when Democrats are out off power in Congress, the public likes Congress more.  Big surprise.

General Social Survey Part 1

The NYTimes published a few charts from the 2006 General Social Survey.  I want to comment on a several.

The ones that are the least interesting show little meaningful change.  The more interesting ones are on the next blog (tomorrow).

The level of "trust of other people" in America seems to have declined from 45% to 35% over 34 years.  I doubt this is all that has happened. While the population that grew up in the 1950s has been displaced by those who grew up in the 1970s, I suspect we have two factors at work. One is that the 1950s people who joined organizations and lived in a more class stratified society had a greater faith in the fellow members of their cohorts.  But equally important, I think the meaning of the word "trust" is what has changed from an abstract attitude toward society to a more specific one about people in one's own life.

The frequency with which people say they pray has not changed in 34 years. About an equal number of people pray daily compared to those who don't pray at all.  The same proportion of people, over the past 34 years, 70%, still believe in an afterlife.  In spite of claims about increasing religiousity in America, the data rejects that proposition.  There has been no change. However, confidence in religious institutions has seen a steady decline for 34 years, which I have written about.  Religious people moved out of the political Lefty mainstream churches into the non-political stand-alone evangelical churches.

The same proportion of people today consider their "life exciting" as did 34 years ago with no change in between.  Similar data shows up in worker surveys.  The stability of this measure is rather stunning and, I believe, a sign that we have a very stable society, that elected Ronald Reagan because he was upbeat and will continue to elect Presidents who appear upbeat.

There has been a decline in fear of being out at night from 45% to 30% since the mid-1990s which reflects an accurate appraisal of risk as crime has decline significantly from the peak in 1991 (I know its going up again).

Acceptance of homosexuality has shown a steady increase in acceptability, suggesting a potential for movement on this issue up to the point that marriage entered the fray.  Acceptance of homosexual teachers above the high school level increased from 50% to 80% over 34 years, the largest single change in the General Survey.

No perceived changes in social class over 34 years. 5% still call themselves "lower", 3% call themselves "upper." The proportion who call themselves "working" has declined slightly, 45% to 40% which is less than the real change in the work force from 24% union to 11% in the same period. "Class" is a vague idea for Americans, it is more of a political view.

Second Jewish tragedy

When Jews were freed from German Concentration Camps they faced an historically unknown problem.  For the individuals who told their own stories, no one believed them.  No one could believe the level of cruelty the Germans inflicted on other human beings deliberately. On millions of innocent human beings. No one could believe it.

Primo Levy writes of the agony of trying to tell people about the depths of human evil and finding no one willing to listen much less able to understand (Survival in Auschwitz).

Again, today, Jews, living in Israel, are faced with the exact same problem. 

Israeli Jews have been treated by Arabs, within and outside Israel, with a level of deliberate cruelty that can not be understood or comprehended by any outsider. Arabs teach their children to die by killing Jews and these Arab children willingly grow up to commit murder-suicide.  Arabs, acting with no hesitation and only imaginary provocation deliberately murder innocent children, elderly and college students.

Most people in the European and English world simply do not comprehend the depths of evil that nearly every Israeli has come to understand, with blood spilled among their friends and within their families.

Israelis are stuck with the inability of other people, including non-Israeli Jews, to fathom the magnitude of Arab evil. This is a tragedy and nothing can be done about.

Anti-American

There are two reasons why most anti-Americans feel the way they do.  They have two powerful reasons to be envious. First an American is born with a high paying job anywhere in the world. Second Americans are born in the country more people want to move to than any other.

Americans who speak clearly and can do a modest job of teaching can teach English anywhere.  No exceptions, anywhere including France.  English is the language of global everything, airplanes, science, technology, medicine, everything.  Every American is born with the potential job of being an English teacher (with an American accent), which is well paid, everywhere.

Second, Americans already live in the country that is the most desirable of all countries from the perspective of the world's immigrant population.  No other country holds the appeal of America for people wanting to go to a new country.  Again, no exceptions, including French speaking Africans and Arabs.  More prefer the U.S. when given a choice.  Even North Koreans would prefer to come to America over China, if they could.

First nationalization

I would argue that a Jew was the father of nationalization...long before Marx, Trotsky, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Fidel or Hugo.

The story is in Genesis 47:18 to 47:28.  Here is just one translation from the Bible in Basic English:

Before this, Joseph had been sold into slavery in Egypt, got thrown into jail, interpreted dreams, became the Pharaohs CEO based on carrying out the dream interpretation of 7 years of feast and 7 of famine.  Joseph ended up controlling all the grain in the known world. The first year he sold grain to every Egyptian farmer and a few others.

---

18 And when that year was ended,....

New World Order

A good description of the changing world order by a brilliant blogger and subject matter expert is Daniel Drezner's in the latest Foreign Affairs.  Here is the summary:

"Controversies over the war in Iraq and U.S. unilateralism have overshadowed a more pragmatic and multilateral component of the Bush administration's grand strategy: its attempt to reconfigure U.S. foreign policy and international institutions in order to account for shifts in the global distribution of power and the emergence of states such as China and India. This unheralded move is well intentioned and well advised, and Washington should redouble its efforts."

Europe again?

A European pop festival has banned an Israeli group, the Teapacks, because of a song, Push the Button, about the threat to Jewish survival.  Hear the song here, its a great song.

You can get a good sense of why Europe hardly cared about the loss of a comparable number of Jews half a century ago. Nearly all of Europe did its part in the past to wipe out the Jews, nothing has changed. Europe still doesn't care about Jews being killed.  It never will.

All you artists out there who think art has a meaningful positive role in the world will have to wonder why the most popular song in Israel, about existential survival, is treated as "political" by the very people who have a history of acting just like Amadinejad.  Europeans would just rather see Jews die than consider their own role as accomplices to murder.

Comfort with ambiguity

One of the major dichotomies of the human personality is comfort with ambiguity versus discomfort.  I have no way to guess whether human dichotomies are hardwired or learned.

If basic human worldviews can be learned, meaning before adulthood freezes the potential to learn, comfort with ambiguity strikes me as the by-product of having fun.

I remember that when one of my children was 18 and a very serious student, I began to worry about her potential for enjoying life.  I met her in Japan and gave her a train ticket to go off and enjoy herself, with the plan of meeting up in Tokyo in two weeks.  When we met up, she was so full of joy and excitement that any concerns about her serious side evaporated.  I knew she would lead a happy life. And she has.

It would appear that the ability to have fun could well be a metric for and proxy for the personality trait "comfortable with ambiguity."

German word

Readers of this blog know that late in my life I am having to change one of my core views of the world.  I have always assumed that people are fairly capable of change, though they seldom do it.  Now I realize that virtually no adult can change regardless of their desire or intent.  Possibly when faced with a choice between change or death one out of ten people will change.

Turns out their is a German word that embodies just such a concept: "Leidensdruck."  Leidensdruck references the suffering of forced change in the face of death or near death.

Dogs in San Francisco

The battle of the dogs is rampant in San Francisco because San Francisco is a city with few children. Therefore dogs are easily two to three times as abundant as children.

As a consequence, the political process is overwhelmed by the dog issue and politics has to mediate the desire of dog owners (PC: "dog masters", "dog guardians"...etc) to let their pets run free wherever possible and the fear of other citizens of being bitten by unleashed dogs or stepping in dog generated excrement.

As a consequence of the political divisions of San Francisco, a common phrase from twenty years ago has a new meaning "I don't give a shit."

Left to Right Fears

Have you noticed that we live on a fear spectrum?

The spectrum runs from fear of Radical Islam on the political Right to fear of CO2 on the political Left.  On neither end of the spectrum does the other side take the other's fear seriously.  The Right considers Armageddon fears of CO2  (greenhouse gas) to be an anti-American political fantasy, and the Left considers the Right's fear of Radical Islam to be a fantasy to support corporate greed and American imperialism.

There are people in the middle of the spectrum that share both fears, fear of CO2 and Radical Islam.

The main point of this blog relates to an earlier blog where I pointed out that America is a "fear culture".  There are family shame cultures, tribal shame cultures and several other cultural constructs.  Fear is our core motivation.  That is why we create fear in infants immediately after birth by leaving them to sleep alone at night and cry themselves to sleep.  Shame cultures don't ever do that. 

So we are a fear culture and we need common fears as an organizing principle. 

That is why we have the spectrum of fear, from Radical Islam to CO2.  That is also why the country is divided into the core Right-Left groups that have their own fears that do not include the other's fears. 

I can't validate or invalidate these core fears.  It would be irrelevant if I could. They would just be replaced by new fears, exactly as the current fears replaced the two earlier fears on our fear spectrum: Fear of Communism on the Right and fear of American Imperialism on the Left.

The Informed Reader

Since the Wall Street Journal got a face lift and some new vitality in January there has been a column called The Informed Reader. The new column summarizes interesting print writing of the day.  The next two blogs are based on material from The Informed Reader.

I also go to Slate.com to read the summary of the major weekly magazines. The rest of Slate is largely uninteresting to me.

Both the Slate and WSJ summaries are valuable.  When are more dailies going to get into the business of summarizing other less frequent material?  Hey folks, its a reader magnet.

Blog removed

This blog space originally dealt with my role in the creation of the current SEC executive compensation reporting requirements.  I played a central role. 

I circulated the original blog, for this space, to others involved in the matter and got a strong reaction...basically 'don't publish that.'    The reason has to do with necessary and sufficient.  This has happened to me several times before.  I was the primary creator of the modern universal credit card.

That statement "I was the primary creator..." is based on my necessary but not sufficient role.  There is no way to tell what would have happened historically if I hadn't walked into that room at Wells Fargo Headquarters, in 1966, where three of my peers were laughing at the stupidity of a recent credit card proposal. I had the unique knowledge of how Bankamericard worked, its inside financials, and I had single-handedly done all the marketing research on that subject.  I was also credible to my friends.  I was necessary, but they were sufficient in both timing, corporate rank and knowledge to push the project ahead.

The New York Times over the past 35 years has published several obituaries giving other bankers credit for the creation of the modern universal credit card.  In reality, not one of them played a meaningful or significant role.  I have recorded the actual history and given due credit to the other men who created the modern credit card. Men who were the sufficient cause of the modern credit card and all of whom testified to my "necessary" singular and central role.

The same is true for my role in creating the current reporting rules for executive compensation.  I was the primary agent in creating these new reports, I was the necessary provocateur, but  I was not sufficient.  Other people were essential at the precise time and place for everything to fall together.  The others deserve recognition and appreciation. Unfortunately, this is an ongoing story and to tell it now, would adversely affect the outcome. 

Landing a plane

One day recently, while flying by myself in a Piper Archer, a single engine low wing plane, I started making a series of landings at the deserted Half Moon Bay airport.  I just kept landing and taking off, time and time again.

I found that I love landing a small plane. Great fun.  Why?

In a commercial plane, the passengers are happy to get the plane on the ground smoothly and gently.  That is reward in itself. 

But I am a pilot and like a bird who uses all the feathers on its body and most of its delicate muscles to land, for me the landing is a precarious transition from the air, where you have to keep moving to stay aloft ... to touchdown on the ground where your static weight is all that matters.

Everything from the gentle glide that begins at 1,000 feet above the airport to the touchdown on the numbers at the start of the landing strip, is exciting.  Like a biological bird, the transition for the mechanical bird's pilot requires flexibility, full attention and an ancient gut level response to the moment by moment changes in every tactile physical extension of the plane that reaches into the cockpit.  What fun.

Kinky sex films

Several national newspapers have covered the story of the Armory in San Francisco being turned into a SM porn studio.

What I can add is that I have dealt with the man who made the decision to sell the Armory and turn it into a porn film studio: Larry Badiner. Larry is a very smart, politically astute and gentle man. 

Larry's decision represents the intersection of two major forces in our society: politics and commerce.  Politics is the non-moral system that has been developed to conciliate the conflicts of power, social interests and ethical values in our polity.  Commerce is the non-moral system that seeks to reduce costs and satisfy the expressed desires of the marketplace.

These two forces converged on the San Francisco Armory. 

The political system mediated (1) the forces opposed to any use of a monumental site with historic attributes, (2) the political values of Lefty voters who believe the City needs subsidized housing, (3) nearby businesses that want foot traffic and (4) developers who see a vacant piece of land worth $100 per square foot. The mediation led to a stalemate because the Planning Department reports to the Board of Supervisors and there is no higher authority in this political system. None, short of a multi-million dollar citizen referendum.

The system of commerce, spent twenty years sorting through the deck of potential businesses that could survive within the S.F. political constraints and connect the price of the property to any collection of buyers in the marketplace.  Lo and behold, lovers of Sado-masochistic films pay enough money for the final retail graphic products to justify including the production done inside the walls of the S.F. Armory.  The price of thousands of retail SM porn videos was high enough to justify a price that would buy the Armory and still remain within the political constraints that require no changes to the external image or overall footprint of the Armory.

When the Planning Department approved a project (sale of the Armory to kink.com) that was fully within its legal domain, especially when it did so quietly, the issue had a final resolution at the Planning Department level.

Larry Badiner was the man to reconcile politics and commerce.  He knew that once he had approved a sale of the Armory to a porn group, the decision could not be reversed by the political system.  Ordinarily this intersection of politics and commerce is where corruption occurs. Badiner knew that the taint of corruption would ultimately unravel his solution to the intractable political stalemate...so I'm sure there was no corruption.

Just a smile on Larry Badiner's face.  He had reconciled two colossal forces, political and commercial, with his own little signature.